People who mistook a meteor sighting for a crashing plane had fire crews hopping on Tuesday night.

Emergency personnel in Toronto “received multiple calls” about a “plane crashing” in the city’s harbour, according to the American Meteor Society (AMS), which provided details of what people actually saw.

Toronto Fire Capt. Mike Westwood confirmed the receipt of two calls, including one at 10:49 p.m. that came across as “a possible meteor over Lake Ontario mistaken for a plane crash.”

Westwood said several fire units responded to Toronto’s harbourfront area, conducted “a sweep,” and later cleared.

As of Wednesday afternoon, an AMS website posting said the agency had received more than 500 reports of a “fireball ... seen over the eastern Great Lakes region” just after 10:30 p.m.

According to the AMS, it was primarily seen from Ontario, but there were also sightings from places such as Quebec, New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, New Jersey, Michigan and Delaware.

Hanno Rein, an assistant professor at the University of Toronto Scarborough and head of the school’s observatory, said Tuesday night’s sightings were the result of a softball-sized meteor travelling through the skies at a speed of 66 kilometres per second.

It was likely part of a meteor shower NASA states is visible from Oct. 4-Nov. 14 and originating from Halley’s Comet, added Rein.

“It is a comet that is in orbit around the sun and we’re basically passing through the comet’s (particle) trail ... and some of those particles will hit the earth and we’ll see them,” he explained.

Rein added people were able to see the meteor because “it has so much energy because it’s travelling so fast, (and) when it slows down in the atmosphere it converts all that energy to radiation that we can see.”